Key hygiene behaviours for safe water and health on World Water Day

Alana Potter, lead author of the WASHCost working paper on “Assessing hygiene cost-effectiveness“, explains the importance of changing hygiene behaviours so that improved water and sanitation can lead to the expected health benefits. She has been reviewing indicators, tools and methods that sector institutions are using to monitor and measure hygiene behaviour change and identified three key hygiene behaviours common to all of these tools. Simply put, these are hand washing, using a toilet (i.e. separation of faeces from users) and safe management of household water. These are crucial for health benefits to be derived from improved water and should be remembered on World Water Day.

Interview and video by Nicolas Dickinson, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre
March 21, 2012

Hi Nicola, I am a colleague of Moritz and one of my research fields is quantifying and characterising faecal slugde on a city-wide scale. The hyperlink to the FAQ project, Moritz refers to in his post leads you to a website with publications about the approach we have implemented in Kampala/Uganda and Hanoi/Vietnam. I could see the application of the latrine […]

Hi Elisabeth, No - I wasn't thinking about it for travelers (if you mean international travelers - although I suppose they might use it too), but anyone who is visiting a town and needs to find a loo. And as well as finding the facility in the first place, I was thinking more as a means to monitor the quality of service provided by the operators of publ […]

NEWSLETTER OF MARCH 2015 LINK TO NEWSLETTER With 28 May just three months away, we're unveiling the new slogan for 2015, giving you a sneak-peek at the MH Day POP-UP Exhibition Toolkit and sharing the latest MHM updates!

Dear Elisabeth, Thank you for the message on our board. We are more than happy to address all your queries and also welcome all future queries and suggestions from you. Regarding the overlap between Wikipedia’s and ours content, we try to compliment the work of Wikipedia rather than compete with them. Additionally most of our content are the direct results o […]

Hi, I find two issues shared here: i. On MHM: Attitudes towards Menstruation: while in some parts a celebration is done on onset of puberty and in other it is kept a secret. www.quora.com/Why-do-the-some-people-cel...berty-in-South-India community I have worked with different communities and experienced: 1. Raised MHM awareness through school/ Peer Educator […]

With the fact that nearly 35% of Delhi slum dwellers still practise open defecation, most of community and public toilets in the capital remains non-functional; the present scenario doesn’t seem to meet the goals of Delhi Master Plan for making the city Open Defecation Free (ODF) by 2015. In this article, Ajay Sinha, Chief Operating Officer, Feedback Foundat […]

We have chosen the winners of our Picturing CLTS photo competition. Thank you to everyone who submitted photos. It was great to see such diverse depictions of CLTS in action and of many related aspects like handwashing, inclusive WASH and monitoring.